Come and enjoy the songs of Ronnie Lane RIP! I would have loved to have met him. Thanks to Pete G for the introduction 😉

Ronnie Lane has been rightly described as a born entertainer, humorous, emotional and spiritual. He was ‘short and sweet’, ‘combined East End nous and the romantic’ and a troubadour to the day he died. Ronnie gambled his shirt on a pipedream, a circus! His approach to music was refreshing and genuine, the gig an instant party.

Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott were one of the great songwriting partnerships of the ’60s. Listen to the Small Faces’ classics, Itchycoo Park or Lazy Sunday for example. The Faces became one of the great rock and roll bands of the ’70s. Ronnie’s next great venture, the Passing Show, was equally rich musically but not commercially or in terms of public recognition at the time.

‘How Come’ was Ronnie’s last top ten (or rather, eleven!) hit, but not his last great song. Living in a remote part of Shropshire, surrounded by showman’s wagons, and inspired by Meher Baba, Ronnie carried on writing and performing with his band Slim Chance and others including Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend even after he was afflicted by MS.

Ronnie was held in such high esteem, that he became the focus of star-studded concerts and tours on both sides of the Atlantic to raise money for other MS sufferers. When he moved to the Texas to seek treatment, he carried on playing with some fine American musicians. Ronnie died in Colorado in 1997 but his songs live on.

Ronnie always jokingly claimed that he found the musicians for Slim Chance in the pages of Exchange and Mart. In 2010 Charlie Hart and Steve Simpson trawled the streets of South London and miraculously found three more ex-Slim Chancers who were all keen to sign up again to the quest for Ronnie’s musical holy grail. By gigging round the country the line-up has gelled into a fine band and become a powerful entity in its own right.

The aim is to create a show which celebrates the range of Ronnie’s later music: to take this show to people in village halls and clubs, festivals and theatres at home and abroad; and eventually, joined by numerous friends, to resurrect the Passing Show itself.